I'm all for good hygiene, but those patting themselves on the back for being such top notch hand washers are just whistling past the grave yard.
General / Off-Topic The safest place
- Thread starter Robin of Spiritwood
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Oh absolutely. It is exactly why the WHO has stopped attributing the names of virusses to regions because this is how idiots respond to that. And predictably, that in itself has become a new conspiracy theory by people, fueled by populists politicians eager to stoke the flames with cheap rhetoric instead of doing their jobs.
It is maddeningly daft. Oh well, not much any of us can do about that. People are gonna people.
Oh I don't know about that, I'm far more concerned about the folks who think being under 70 somehow means that they are immune!
A few random attacks (which are only alledged to be connected to virus blaming) doesn't justify scrubbing the country of origin of the virus and their actions from the conversation.
Indeed...but us lot in here are hardly likely to pop out and give some poor Chinese bloke a kicking
No, I certainly wouldn't. And I think there are very few who would in general. What you're seeing is the mighty hand of the CCP reaching out across the globe and manipulating all the switches and dials with their nefarious tentacles to lay down the groundwork for wriggling as far as possible away from accepting any responsibility for what's happening once the crisis is over and discussing accountability is the back on the table.Indeed...but us lot in here are hardly likely to pop out and give some poor Chinese bloke a kicking
Namely, enlisting the help of various government's and agencies to run cover. In America that would be roughly 80% of the media and the entire democratic party.
Nobody argues that. Anyway, all these conspiracies are getting very silly again, so I'l leave this part of the discussion to those interested in it.
Racists and xenophobes are always looking for an excuse... Even if this were to be some kind of chinese bioweapon, those restaurant workers certainly wouldn't have anything to do with it.
Group punishment is one of the worst kind of ideas ever to surface the earth, but amazingly it's even used in schools, we actually teach the notion of group punishment being valid to our children since early age.
I wouldn't say that nefarious tactic is unique to the CCP...both our
What's getting silly is your constant shouting down of views that are critical of China, especially silly given how many posts criticizing America you've written.
Nobody argues that. Anyway, all these conspiracies are getting very silly again, so I'l leave this part of the discussion to those interested in it.
Did you report my post again, Stiggy-wiggy?
I wouldn't say that nefarious tactic is unique to the CCP...both ourcountriesNations of origin have a long and shady history of doing exactly the same. Living in glass houses and all that, but perhaps a bit more off topic for this discussion than it appears
Absolutely. I struggle with naming a European country that does not have not just a single black page but an entire black chapter in their history book (Iceland, maybe?). Acknowledging that goes a great way to squashing any notion of exceptionalism, and makes it easier to look for the causes of any situation. After all, if you admit your country did dumb crap before, it is not a great stretch to consider they might be doing dumb crap again. So as COVID19 becomes an increasingly problematic situation in the Netherlands, I don't have to jump to notions that this is due to a secret plot by China (to "kill their elders" or "specifically targeted at the west" or whichever flavor-of-the-day conspiracy people float).
Instead I can immediately consider far more mundane ideas such as:"We have been consistently warned about the possibility of zoonosis, particularly regarding corona-virusses, and doubly so from China. So when a corona-type zoonosis emerged in China, we probably should have been a tad more pro-active about it."
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Or it is just really, really crappy science that makes such fundamental mistakes that there is no point in a further full analysis. This happens more often than you think, it just doesn't hit the news because most of it is boring and irrelevant to pretty much everyone. I've once been part of a peer review where I spend ten minutes, rather than the allotted six weeks, on the review. My review consisted of one sentence and one link. The paper was then withdrew by the authors.
Those folks probably submitted elsewhere hoping the next panel wouldn't catch it (spend too much money/time on it, have to publish it somewhere. sigh), but such lameness is not really possible when it hits major news outlets.
In general, people with zero scientific background or experience who reject peer-reviewed science ("well, what do those elitist eggheads know?!?!") but accept withdrawn reports ("Big Science is trying to keep the truth hidden!") are just looking for personal validation of their own believes. And that is going to happen a lot in the coming week as reality will contrast more and more with personal and political beliefs held by people. Some will show the strength of character and revise their opinions, others will descend to whatever flimsy conspiracy theory is needed to uphold their world view.
Could be.... Or it was spot-on and had to be pulled instantly for political reasons. Too hot.
Anyway, it's something I merely recommend to keep in the back of your head - if you so choose to.
Either way, what are the odds of a high-grade Biohazard suddenly popping up for the very first time and out of nowhere on a Food Market?
Despite chinese eating habits being well-known and have been that way since a very, very long time.
And in pure coincidence, a merely 20mi distant Wuhan Institute of Virology , China's first ever BSL-4 Laboratory?
Possible of course. Depends on point of view, though.
Disclaimer : not pointing fingers here, no way of telling.
I just don't blindly believe in coincidences when there's plenty of evidence and data points indicating something else.
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... I don't have to jump to notions that this is due to a secret plot by China (to "kill their elders" or "specifically targeted at the west" or whichever flavor-of-the-day conspiracy people float).
Instead I can immediately consider far more mundane ideas such as:"We have been consistently warned about the possibility of zoonosis, particularly regarding corona-virusses, and doubly so from China. So when a corona-type zoonosis emerged in China, we probably should have been a tad more pro-active about it."
They did acted really suspicious and basically let it go out in the world while telling WHO that it does not transmit human-to-human
China censors report about how authorities hid coronavirus genome sequence test results for 14 days | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP
By Oiwan Lam Chinese media outlets have been accused of echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s political propaganda in understating the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak. It was only on 20 January 2020 when Beijing finally admitted the existence of human-to-human transmission. But the surge in...
www.hongkongfp.com
Got a call from work this am.
They want to know if working withOUT pay is something I might be interested in, at personal risk, during the pandemic.
It's possible to not live to not spend the money you didn't make... real attractive offer there.
They want to know if working withOUT pay is something I might be interested in, at personal risk, during the pandemic.
It's possible to not live to not spend the money you didn't make... real attractive offer there.
Our prime minister yelled at us this morning. We got a full-on dressing down.
“You all think you’re invincible. You’re not. Enough is enough. Go home and stay home.”
Apparently, only grocery stores (and shoppers) and medical staff are supposed to be going out. They want to flatten the curve completely, eliminate the spread, and return everyone to work at full pace in as little time as possible. This really is the only way to do it.
If we don't comply, the police might be ordered to enforce distancing. Try that with the Florida spring break kids.
If you are part of the most affected demographics - you should stay safe
To be clear: as far as viruses go, this one is pretty mild. It scores a disappointing '2' when it comes to how contagious it is, and its lethality is profoundly underwhelming. I mean, I would expect a Chinese high-grade bioweapon to do better than this: https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/22/95-y...est-woman-italy-recover-coronavirus-12438267/
As for how likely it is to emerge from a Chinese food market? Well, likely enough that a Chinese food market is explicitly suggested in a book I have about zoonosis from 2012. More generally speaking China is the country where you expect this to happen, to the point that when CDC funding was cut it mentioned China first when listing the problematic regions in 2018: https://globalhealth.duke.edu/media/news/op-ed-odds-devastating-pandemic-just-went
Heck, even ignoring the cultural elements promoting extensive contacts between humans and well-known reservoir animals (some specifically known to be reservoir hosts to corona viruses!), even if you know nothing about Chinese culture or zoonosis or any of this whatsoever, it would still be your most likely bet: 20% of the worlds population lives in China, they have 15 of the 50 largest metropoles on the planet, most of it is in climates very conducive to viruses (which is also the climate humans tend to appreciate) and so on. I mean, come on: how likely do you think it is that a new corona virus emerges in the same region as another (SARS) did a few years ago. That is not a coincidence, but it is not a conspiracy either.
It is part nature, part negligence. Mind you, I am not ruling things out definitely, but such conspiracies would be way, way down on my list of explanations.
They did acted really suspicious and basically let it go out in the world while telling WHO that it does not transmit human-to-human
China censors report about how authorities hid coronavirus genome sequence test results for 14 days | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP
By Oiwan Lam Chinese media outlets have been accused of echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s political propaganda in understating the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak. It was only on 20 January 2020 when Beijing finally admitted the existence of human-to-human transmission. But the surge in...
China (or at least, CCP) has always struggled massively with what they consider 'showing weakness'. If anything happens, anything at all, that could be (mis)construed as a negative thing the CCP's first instinctive response is to flat-out deny it, forbid people to speak about it and lock-up people who ignore that. Even if the negative thing was completely beyond their control, even if no reasonable person would blame them for it, they cannot acknowledge it happened. It is so transparent that there is very little faith in any communication from the CCP among the younger Chinese citizens. So when China says everything is going great, that could mean quite literally anything. But them responding the way they did to this outbreak is not so much suspicious, it is just pretty much how we've always know they act. And equally predictably, as soon as something negative happens which they can no longer deny, they shift gears into blaming some other country for it. The USA or Japan if possible. When trying to figure out what happened CCP's response is useless as they always respond like this.
In other words: a very predictable (though maybe not preventable, but CCP in any case certainly did not even try to prevent it the past years) outbreak was handled in a very predictable way, resulting in equally predictable conspiracy theories.
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